Documentary Elements Research Articles

Réalisa(c)trices screening the self: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn

ABSTRACTBetween 2000 and 2010, several actresses-turned-directors have revisited notions of the quest for identity and artistic creation by screening themselves in their films. Using Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Maïwenn as case studies, this article considers how these réalisa(c)trices redefine auteurship, using the generic framework of autofiction borrowed from literature. In Il est plus facile pour un chameau… (Bruni Tedeschi, 2003), Pardonnez-moi (Maïwenn, 2006), Actrices (Bruni Tedeschi, 2007) and Le Bal des actrices (Maïwenn, 2009), they propose films labelled as fictions, which not only mix genres to include fake documentary form and non-realist elements such as staged shows and fantasy episodes, but also playfully rework certain conventions of autofiction, redefining the links between personal experience and acting, introspection and the process of artistic creation. In doing so, they engage in cathartic attempts to resolve personal issues, at the same time as reflecting on aspects of their professional engagement as auteurs and actresses, filming and being filmed. This produces cinematic experiments in form and narrative that blend realism and fantasy, being and acting, in which the need to stage and screen the self meets the urge to perform, thus reworking our understanding of what autofiction can offer cinema.

РОЛЬ ДОКУМЕНТАЛЬНОГО НАЧАЛА В РОМАНЕ У. СТАЙРОНА «ВЫБОР СОФИ»

Summ ry. The paper studies the relation of documentary elements and fiction in the novel “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron. The story is told by a young writer Stingo who becomes a friend with a Jew called Nathan and a Polish refugee girl Sophie – survivor of the O wi cim (Auschwitz) concentration camp. Styron wrote the novel on the basis of many documents. The influence of real life documents on the novel is studied in this paper.

The Skin of the Other

The face is a living presence; it is expression.... The face speaks. The manifestation of face is already discourse.-Emmanuel Levinas (1969, p. 66)And whole body-a hand or a curve of shoulder-can express as face.-Emmanuel Levinas (1969, p. 262)It is immediacy of a skin and a face, a skin which is always a modification of a face, a face that is weighted down with a skin.-Emmanuel Levinas (1991, p. 85)Disturbing EncountersJay Rosenblatt has remarked that seeing an image of Adolf Hitler eating was disturbing encounter behind his 1998 Human Remains. Human Remains is Rosenblatt's best known and most discussed film. It is also one of his most controversial because of its relation to skin of and to skin of its viewers. This simple image, of possibly most infamous dictator in modern history, involved in simplest and possibly most commonly shared human activity, provokes us to recognize Hitler as human and disturbs our simplistic image of him as a monster. The image gets under our skin and reminds us that needs a body. It reminds us that only someone who can hunger can give food. Only someone who eats, sleeps, and is weighted with skin can be ethical. Only an embodied, vulnerable human being is able to respond to call of other. No longer an icon of inhumanity, ultimate sign of evil, nor a superhuman idol outside law, simple image of Hitler eating disturbingly thrust upon Rosenblatt unmistakable recognition that Hitler was and will always remain human and responsible for his actions. Provoked by an image, Rosenblatt turns in Human Remains to provoke his audience with sounds and images that call us to recognize and respond to our own disturbing encounters with duality of skin of other.In her book, Selfless Cinema?: and French Documentary, Sarah Cooper (2006) asks what it mean in ethical terms to see face of as our own. What it mean, ethically, if were to acknowledge an irreducible alterity that comes from cinema but also slips bonds of cinema? What if acknowledge difference cinematic apparatus creates but cannot control? She claims, on one hand, that within film, as well as in all cinema, subjects of films might be seen to resist reduction to vision of film-maker who fashions them, aligning this irreducibility with asymmetrical relation to Other in Levinasian thought (p. 5). And, on other, that some images not only escape control of film-maker who fashions them but also spectator (p. 6). Some images, Cooper argues, because they provoke us to see in excess of what expect to see, show us how elements of documentary may resist reflective mechanism that would refer one back to oneself or one's own world (p. 8). When what see exceeds what expect, limitations of film-making, inability of films to completely objectify and totalize world, disturb us with an encounter of face and skin of as our own. When see what exceeds our expectations, our spontaneity and authority are called into question, our powers of control are interrupted, and our sovereignty is overthrown. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas (1969) writes, we name this calling into question of my spontaneity by presence of Other ethics (p. 43). In such disturbing encounters, argues Cooper, Ethics ruptures being of film (p. 12). interrupts and disturbs cinema, calls into question its spontaneity and authority, its ability to capture and re-present other. However, this parallel between ethical and cinematic disturbances is static. For, as Cooper explains, the ethical traverses filmic but shatters an exact mirroring of terms of Levinasian ethical debate and discussion of cinema in general or in particular, since neither can contain other (p. …

Modelos de gestión documental en las agencias de publicidad

Advertising, one of the leading communications media today, requires special techniques for research and documentation without which its effectiveness could be questioned. A brief study is made of advertising documentation in Spain from the theoretical and practical points of view. Then, the models for document management used in the agencies are studied and explained, and a definition of what is understood to be advertising documentation is drawn up. In addition, the documentary elements that should be used in the advertising campaigns and in the proper functioning of the documentation centres are proposed.

Cultural Learnings of Borat Make for Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary

Cultural Learnings of Borat Make for Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary Leshu Torchin Introduction The genre to which a film is assigned reflects how a culture understands the boundaries between perception and reality—what can be accepted on screen as true or false, right or wrong. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan ( Dir. Larry Charles, 2006), for example, has challenged our cultural assumptions by challenging our generic assumptions. Is it a documentary? A mockumentary? A narrative fiction? Most efforts to categorise the film focus on the humour, referring to it as comedy and mockumentary. But they do not account for how Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen) interacts with people on screen or for his own claims that these encounters produce significant information about the world. Fictional genres always bear some degree of indexical relationship to the lived world (Sobchack 1984), and that relationship only intensifies in a traditional documentary. Borat, however, confuses the genres: a fictional TV host steps out of the mock travelogue of his fictional hometown and steps into a journey through a real America. The indexical relationship between the screen world and the real world varies, then, with almost every scene, sometimes working as fiction, sometimes as documentary, sometimes as mockumentary. Click for larger view View full resolution Documentary and mockumentary practices exist simultaneously in the film. Whereas a mockumentary sheathes its fictions within a documentary style, though, Borat sheathes its documentary elements (the interviews are perfectly real to the unwitting participants) within a fiction. Generic stability is complicated further when Borat drops his initial documentary plan of tracking down actress Pamela Anderson, whom he has seen as “CJ” in the television series Baywatch. But from interviews with actual people and from news and clips of Anderson’s pornographic home video, Borat is disillusioned, believing that he now knows the true Anderson behind the mediated form on screen. One television program is thus exchanged for another, and this uneasy exchange throughout the film characterizes its unsettled nature as a genre and as a description of reality. Borat’s fictional voyage—complete with interviews, staged encounters, and provocations—is not so distant from the documentary tradition, which has been on shaky ontological and epistemological ground since Auguste and Louis Lumière staged their first actualities and Robert Flaherty enlisted Allakariallak to play Nanook in Nanook of the North (1922), a re-enactment of past Inuit life. Borat bears a resemblance to a variety of documentaries—notably, to Jean Rouch’s “ethnofictions” and hoax documentaries. It also suggests the modes of documentary Bill Nichols has called “reflexive” and “performative” for the way they question documentary authority, disorient the audience, and ask us to reconsider the premises that underpin the documentary’s claim to truth and knowledge ( Nichols 1994). The film just as readily invokes Stella Bruzzi’s “performative documentary” for its emphasis on performative elements of both the filmmaker and the subjects (2006). [End Page 53] However, as a mockumentary and a documentary of a mockumentary, and even a fake mockumentary, the film continually retreats behind layer upon layer of reference—in an interrogation of American bigotry (Strauss 2006) that recursively implicates the media itself. He elicits damning information, for example, by staging an inter-cultural encounter between the American (Western) subjects and the racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and socially ignorant Borat, the caricature of the Eastern foreigner, a modern-day Other. Sam Ali of the Newark Star-Ledger has expressed concern that this construction of the foreigner is dangerous to Muslims. In spite of Baron Cohen’s (and Borat’s) denial of any Muslim identity, Ali declares that Kazakhstan’s predominantly Muslim population, combined with Borat’s anti-Semitism and misogyny, is enough to cast Borat as Muslim in the American imagination. A fair enough point: Borat’s rehearsals of Occidental xenophobia feed a stereotype. But they also clearly expose bigotries behind the rhetoric of enlightenment and equality. In this latter regard, the film may accomplish more than Baron Cohen set out to do. The performances do more than “let people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice,” as Baron Cohen has explained. The meeting of “primitive” and “modern” subjects...

Urban geography as pretext: Sociocultural landscapes of Kuala Lumpur in independent Malaysian films

Current independent filmmaking in Malaysia has the potential to be an alternative and viable space for creative and political expression, relative to mainstream national cinema (Malay cinema) and to the state. I focus on alternative imagery and sociocultural mappings of Kuala Lumpur in three ‘indie’ films. All three films contain documentary elements capturing social geographies of the city not represented in mainstream Malay cinema, or even if represented not subjected to a critical gaze by the filmmaker. The Big Durian centres on the perspectives of the city's urban middle class of all ethnicities; Bukak Api portrays the daily struggles of Malay transsexual sex workers in Chow Kit, a predominantly working-class Chinese neighbourhood and red light district; and 18? highlights the opinions of the nongovernmental organization community, bohemians, artists, anarchists and media activists mostly in the cosmopolitan suburb of Bangsar. These representations of the Malaysian urban landscape are pretexts for and politicize the national landscape through a discussion of ethnicity and race politics, sexuality, and the lack of space for freedom of creative expression and critical thinking.

Central European Twins: Psychoanalysis and Cinema in Ildikó Enyedi's My Twentieth Century

Ildiko Enyedi's My 20th Century (1989), set at the turn of the previous century, presents a fictional narrative with documentary elements, evoking a moment of convergence when both cinema and psychoanalysis were, like the twins born during the film's opening sequences, in their infancy. Together, the twins incarnate the split schisms of modernity, the competing claims on women confronted by the dual demands of fem ale sexuality and equality, the implications of self in relation to other. The film's stylistic power is rendered through the use of strategies of paradox and irony, favored tropes of Central European artistic representation; while critiquing of national and patriarchal discourses, it problematizes and comments upon female pleasure and desire. By foregrounding the power of the feminine in the encounter between twin protagonists and the patriarchal world of Freud's Central Europe, the director places female subjectivity at the center of the action, setting the stage for a narrative of desire localized in and focalized by the female gaze. In a key sequence of feminist solidarity, the sisters test the evolution of scientific wisdom by attending the lectures of Otto Weininger on “Sex and Character,” a moment that satirizes and undermines Victorian Austro-Hungarian moeurs and acknowledges the history of early feminist suffrage, repressed from public discourse during the decades of communism in Eastern Europe. Re-reading My Twentieth Century through the double lens of psychoanalysis and feminism at a moment when Hungary rejoins the European Community at once affirms and reclaims female desire and hope for something new.

‘Crossings’: Documentary elements and essayistic devices in the fiction and non-fiction films of Evans Chan

Evans Chan is a transnational Chinese film-maker, based in New York, but originating from China and educated in Hong Kong and Macau. This paper focuses particularly on the historical, cultural and political elements in Chan's oeuvre and also examines the important role of historical, documentary components in the structure of Chan's notionally fictional films in addition to his more conventional documentaries. The locus of Chan's film-making attention to date is predominantly Hong Kong and Macau. He is particularly interested in the way these enclaves on the China coast have responded to their reintegration into the China Mainland, following their Handovers of the late nineties from British and Portuguese rule respectively. Nobody produces better documentary and fictional-documentary crossover work about these subjects than Chan, especially in relation to the complex cultural and historical contexts involved. All of his films are essayistic in structure and style and difficult to categorise, which is perhaps why he is not better known. The paper introduces Chan's work and, in doing so, makes a strong argument for the wider recognition of his importance, in terms of his approach to both the content and the form of contemporary cinema.

Performing the Real

This article places Big Brother in the context of shifts in factual television's forms and functions. Having identified some of the distinctive features of Big Brother's construction of telereality, it reviews the category of “documentary” across some of its dominant modes. The current emphasis on formats that divert as much as they inform or question is given particular attention, and the wider social and cultural coordinates of this trend are noted. The possibility that we are moving into a “postdocumentary” culture is posed. This is a culture in which many conventional elements of documentary will continue to develop, but in a radically changed setting—economic and cultural—for all audiovisual documentation.

The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism

In this dynamic reappraisal of American literary naturalism, Christophe Den Tandt connects late nineteenth-century fiction to its romantic, urban gothic roots and to recent discussions of the sublime in postmodern theory. Den Tandt focuses on aspects of naturalist novels -- their use of hyperbole and hysteria, of the grotesque and the abject, of uncanniness and mesmerism -- that have often been left in the periphery of naturalist discourse. He argues that realistic strategies of literary representation can never succeed in depicting the urban environment since the logic of the city rests on a network of hidden relations. Naturalist texts try to resolve this dilemma by opposing sublime components and realistic documentary elements.

New light on The foundations of the origin of species: A reconstruction of the archival record.

Between the first formulation of a theory and its mature exposition often lie many years of revision. Such was the case for Charles Darwin's theory of descent. In the six years between 1838, when he first grasped the importance of natural selection, and the composition of the fair copy of the 1844 Essay, Darwin made several attempts to write out his ideas. The general nature of these documents has been known since the publication by Francis Darwin in 1909 of Darwin's 1842 Pencil Sketch and the 1844 Essay.' However, important documentary elements, particularly for the transitional period between the notebooks of the late 1 830s and the Essays of the early 1840s, have remained incomplete and unclear. It is now possible to clarify the record and to reconstruct in detail Darwin's transition from insight to essay. As is well known, Darwin between 1837 and 1839 recorded his speculations on species in a series of four Transmutation Notebooks.2 But it is not well known that loose pages, not yet published, have been found from two later Transmutation Notebooks. Darwin appears to have removed all the pages of interest in these 1839-1842 notebooks and discarded the bindings. Hence we call them his "Torn-Apart Notebooks." The earliest and most important of these, reconstructed by Sydney Smith,3 comprises at least 42 surviving manuscript pages with